SEO and Page Titles

One of the things I’ve learned in my SEO travels, is that search engine rules evolve over time, and are becoming closer and closer to what a user wants, as contrasted with what the search engine finds pragmatic.

As such, a meaningful page title makes a lot of sense. For example, in this case, the title is SEO and Title Pages[Ron Amundson] While its not super friendly, it does serve to identify what this page is truley about. In the ideal case, my blog software would allow me to set the title page in a more readable fashion. However, be that as it may, at least, if a user looks at the title, they have something readable that makes sense.

Often times, page title names are either computer generated, and thus not terribly intelligible, or in other cases, they are a default setting spread across a whole web page. Both of these scenarios are not the greatest for users, nor are they conducive to a search engine.

The other thing to keep in mind, is that the title of a page, should indicate what is on that page. I know it seems obvious, but it seems that many in the web community seem to miss the fact that web pages are read by humans, and no matter how much you choose to game the search engines to visit your page. If a user shows up, and then immediately hits the back button, you never had a chance to tell them about your content anyhow.

There are cool tools available to verify keyword density, such that you can verify your title indeed reflects the content of your page. Here is one super cool such analyzer http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html.